Meltdown Artisan is run by owner and sole-operator Jen Lo. Each and every part of the business from emails, conceptual development, production and pack and send is managed by just two hands.

With a background in Visual Communications, in 2015, Jen left the world of design after working for several years in industry. She delved headfirst into her love of food—one home-based business, two retail shopfronts and a global pandemic later, she is now operating Meltdown as an e-commerce business out of a studio kitchen in the beautiful Blue Mountains of Australia.

The chocolate supply chain is one rife with problems—not just of sustainability, but also very real human issues, with many people being exploited and abused along the way. It’s the mission of Meltdown to talk about these issues and to encourage mindful consumption, knowing where what you’re eating is coming from and how it has been sourced.

In early 2025, almost ten years on, Jen relaunched Meltdown Artisan as a 100% bean-to-bar business, sourcing transparently traded cocoa beans from several different cocoa growing regions across the globe.

A less is more approach, with quality being at the heart of everything.

Beyond the chocolate, you can find Jen trying to maximise the output of her vegetable and cut flower garden, or hanging out with her husband, Nick, and their rescue greyhound, Yuzu.

When I first started out as a chocolatier, I had very little idea about what actually went into the making of the chocolate couverture that would magically show up in my deliveries each week.

In running my own business, oftentimes, the bottomline took priority over most things. I thought it was a badge of honour to be using the ‘finest Belgian’ or ‘finest French’ chocolate, pouring kilo after kilo into an automatic tempering machine and paying no mind to what (and more importantly, who) these little chocolate callets were actually costing.

It was a curiosity of spirit that led me to delve a little deeper into how chocolate was made…and from there the choices became less about cost, and more about quality and accountability that the producers I was buying from could provide!

When I went a step further and actually dipped my toe into making chocolate from beans, I realised that there was an entire universe of untapped flavour potential. How could chocolate taste like ripe bananas or jasmine tea?

While that was of course a wonderful revelation, I more importantly understood that being able to buy cocoa beans transparently or even via direct trade, meant that I could help to play a small part in preserving fine cocoa flavour, and to shine a spotlight on some of the bigger issues in the industry.

There is a LOT of change that needs to happen to make cocoa a sustainable industry—for everyone. I hope that I am able to continue the dialogue around what small steps we can be taking to improve within our own daily choices, while providing you with tasty morsels of Theobroma Cacao, aka the food of the gods along the way.

As always, thanks for the support! 🧡

Photo credit: Maja Baska Photography